The Secret Places of the Heart (20 page)

"And I believe in it, when I talk of it to you."

Sir Richmond was stirred very deeply by Miss Grammont's confidences. His
dispute with Dr. Martineau was present in his mind, so that he did not
want to make love to her. But he was extremely anxious to express his
vivid sense of the value of her friendship. And while he hesitated over
this difficult and unfamiliar task she began to talk again of herself,
and in such a way as to give a new turn to Sir Richmond's thoughts.

"Perhaps I ought to tell you a little more about myself," she said; "now
that I have told you so much. I did a thing that still puzzles me. I was
filled with a sense of hopeless disaster in France and I suppose I had
some sort of desperate idea of saving something out of the situation....
I renewed my correspondence with Gunter Lake. He made the suggestion I
knew he would make, and I renewed our engagement."

"To go back to wealth and dignity in New York?"

"Yes."

"But you don't love him?"

"That's always been plain to me. But what I didn't realize, until I had
given my promise over again, was that I dislike him acutely."

"You hadn't realized that before?"

"I hadn't thought about him sufficiently. But now I had to think about
him a lot. The other affair had given me an idea perhaps of what it
means to be married to a man. And here I am drifting back to him. The
horrible thing about him is the steady ENVELOPING way in which he has
always come at me. Without fellowship. Without any community of ideas.
Ready to make the most extraordinary bargains. So long as he can in any
way fix me and get me. What does it mean? What is there behind those
watching, soliciting eyes of his? I don't in the least love him, and
this desire and service and all the rest of it he offers me—it's not
love. It's not even such love as Caston gave me. It's a game he plays
with his imagination."

She had released a flood of new ideas in Sir Richmond's mind. "This
is illuminating," he said. "You dislike Lake acutely. You always have
disliked him."

"I suppose I have. But it's only now I admit it to myself."

"Yes. And you might, for example, have married him in New York before
the war."

"It came very near to that."

"And then probably you wouldn't have discovered you disliked him. You
wouldn't have admitted it to yourself."

"I suppose I shouldn't. I suppose I should have tried to believe I loved
him."

"Women do this sort of thing. Odd! I never realized it before. And there
are endless wives suppressing an acute dislike. My wife does. I see now
quite clearly that she detests me. Reasonably enough. From her angle I'm
entirely detestable. But she won't admit it, won't know of it. She never
will. To the end of my life, always, she will keep that detestation
unconfessed. She puts a face on the matter. We both do. And this affair
of yours.... Have you thought how unjust it is to Lake?"

"Not nearly so much as I might have done."

"It is unfair to him. Atrociously unfair. He's not my sort of man,
perhaps, but it will hurt him cruelly according to the peculiar laws
of his being. He seems to me a crawling sort of lover with an immense
self-conceit at the back of his crawlingness."

"He has," she endorsed.

"He backs himself to crawl—until he crawls triumphantly right over
you.... I don't like to think of the dream he has.... I take it he will
lose. Is it fair to go into this game with him?"

"In the interests of Lake," she said, smiling softly at Sir Richmond in
the moonlight. "But you are perfectly right."

"And suppose he doesn't lose!"

Sir Richmond found himself uttering sentiments.

"There is only one decent way in which a civilized man and a civilized
woman may approach one another. Passionate desire is not enough. What is
called love is not enough. Pledges, rational considerations, all these
things are worthless. All these things are compatible with hate.
The primary essential is friendship, clear understanding, absolute
confidence. Then within that condition, in that elect relationship, love
is permissible, mating, marriage or no marriage, as you will—all things
are permissible...."

Came a long pause between them.

"Dear old cathedral," said Miss Grammont, a little irrelevantly. She
had an air of having concluded something that to Sir Richmond seemed
scarcely to have begun. She stood looking at the great dark facade edged
with moonlight for some moments, and then turned towards the hotel,
which showed a pink-lit window.

"I wonder," she said, "if Belinda is still up, And what she will think
when I tell her of the final extinction of Mr. Lake. I think she rather
looked forward to being the intimate friend, secrets and everything, of
Mrs. Gunter Lake."

Sir Richmond woke up at dawn and he woke out of an extraordinary dream.
He was saying to Miss Grammont: "There is no other marriage than the
marriage of true minds. There is no other marriage than the marriage of
true minds." He saw her as he had seen her the evening before, light and
cool, coming towards him in the moonlight from the hotel. But also in
the inconsistent way of dreams he was very close to her kind, faintly
smiling face, and his eyes were wet with tears and he was kissing
her hand. "My dear wife and mate," he was saying, and suddenly he was
kissing her cool lips.

He woke up and stared at his dream, which faded out only very slowly
before the fresh sun rise upon the red tiles and tree boughs outside the
open window, and before the first stir and clamour of the birds.

He felt like a court in which some overwhelmingly revolutionary piece of
evidence had been tendered. All the elaborate defence had broken down at
one blow. He sat up on the edge of his bed, facing the new fact.

"This is monstrous and ridiculous," he said, "and Martineau judged me
exactly. I am in love with her.... I am head over heels in love with
her. I have never been so much in love or so truly in love with anyone
before."

That was the dawn of a long day of tension for Sir Richmond and Miss
Grammont. Because each was now vividly aware of being in love with the
other and so neither was able to see how things were with the other.
They were afraid of each other. A restraint had come upon them both, a
restraint that was greatly enhanced by their sense of Belinda, acutely
observant, ostentatiously tactful and self-effacing, and prepared at the
slightest encouragement to be overwhelmingly romantic and sympathetic.
Their talk waned, and was revived to an artificial activity and waned
again. The historical interest had evaporated from the west of England
and left only an urgent and embarrassing present.

But the loveliness of the weather did not fail, and the whole day was
set in Severn landscapes. They first saw the great river like a sea
with the Welsh mountains hanging in the sky behind as they came over the
Mendip crest above Shipham. They saw it again as they crossed the hill
before Clifton Bridge, and so they continued, climbing to hill crests
for views at Alveston and near Dursley, and so to Gloucester and the
lowest bridge and thence back down stream again through fat meadow lands
at first and much apple-blossom and then over gentle hills through wide,
pale Nownham and Lidney and Alvington and Woolaston to old Chepstow and
its brown castle, always with the widening estuary to the left of them
and its foaming shoals and shining sand banks. From Chepstow they turned
back north along the steep Wye gorge to Tintern, and there at the snug
little Beaufort Arms with its prim lawn and flower garden they ended the
day's journey.

Tintern Abbey they thought a poor graceless mass of ruin down beside
the river, and it was fenced about jealously and locked up from their
invasion. After dinner Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont went for a walk in
the mingled twilight and moonlight up the hill towards Chepstow. Both of
them were absurdly and nervously pressing to Belinda to come with them,
but she was far too wise to take this sudden desire for her company
seriously. Her dinner shoes, she said, were too thin. Perhaps she
would change and come out a little later. "Yes, come later," said Miss
Grammont and led the way to the door.

They passed through the garden. "I think we go up the hill? " said Sir
Richmond.

"Yes," she agreed, "up the hill."

Followed a silence.

Sir Richmond made an effort, but after some artificial and disconnected
talk about Tintern Abbey, concerning, which she had no history ready,
and then, still lamer, about whether Monmouthshire is in England
or Wales, silence fell again. The silence lengthened, assumed a
significance, a dignity that no common words might break.

Then Sir Richmond spoke. "I love, you," he said, "with all my heart."

Her soft voice came back after a stillness. "I love you," she said,
"with all myself."

"I had long ceased to hope," said Sir Richmond, "that I should ever find
a friend... a lover... perfect companionship...."

They went on walking side by side, without touching each other or
turning to each other.

"All the things I wanted to think I believe have come alive in me," she
said....

"Cool and sweet," said Sir Richmond. "Such happiness as I could not have
imagined."

The light of a silent bicycle appeared above them up the hill and swept
down upon them, lit their two still faces brightly and passed.

"My dear," she whispered in the darkness between the high hedges.

They stopped short and stood quite still, trembling. He saw her face,
dim and tender, looking up to his.

Then he took her in his arms and kissed her lips as he had desired in
his dream....

When they returned to the inn Belinda Seyffert offered flat explanations
of why she had not followed them, and enlarged upon the moonlight effect
of the Abbey ruins from the inn lawn. But the scared congratulations
in her eyes betrayed her recognition that momentous things had happened
between the two.

Sir Richmond had talked in the moonlight and shadows of having found
such happiness as he could not have imagined. But when he awoke in the
night that happiness had evaporated. He awoke suddenly out of this love
dream that had lasted now for nearly four days and he awoke in a mood of
astonishment and dismay.

He had thought that when he parted from Dr. Martineau he had parted also
from that process of self-exploration that they had started together,
but now he awakened to find it established and in full activity in his
mind. Something or someone, a sort of etherealized Martineau-Hardy, an
abstracted intellectual conscience, was demanding what he thought he was
doing with Miss Grammont and whither he thought he was taking her, how
he proposed to reconcile the close relationship with her that he was now
embarked upon with, in the first place, his work upon and engagements
with the Fuel Commission, and, in the second place, Martin Leeds.
Curiously enough Lady Hardy didn't come into the case at all. He had
done his utmost to keep Martin Leeds out of his head throughout the
development of this affair. Now in an unruly and determined way that was
extremely characteristic of her she seemed resolute to break in.

She appeared as an advocate, without affection for her client but
without any hostility, of the claims of Miss Grammont to be let alone.
The elaborate pretence that Sir Richmond had maintained to himself that
he had not made love to Miss Grammont, that their mutual attraction had
been irresistible and had achieved its end in spite of their resolute
and complete detachment, collapsed and vanished from his mind. He
admitted to himself that driven by a kind of instinctive necessity he
had led their conversation step by step to a realization and declaration
of love, and that it did not exonerate him in the least that Miss
Grammont had been quite ready and willing to help him and meet him half
way. She wanted love as a woman does, more than a man does, and he
had steadily presented himself as a man free to love, able to love and
loving.

"She wanted a man to love, she wanted perfected fellowship, and you have
made her that tremendous promise. That was implicit in your embrace. And
how can you keep that promise?"

It was as if Martin spoke; it was her voice; it was the very quality of
her thought.

"You belong to this work of yours, which must needs be interrupted or
abandoned if you take her. Whatever is not mortgaged to your work is
mortgaged to me. For the strange thing in all this is that you and I
love one another—and have no power to do otherwise. In spite of all
this.

"You have nothing to give her but stolen goods," said the shadow of
Martin. "You have nothing to give anyone personally any more....

"Think of the love that she desires and think of this love that you can
give....

"Is there any new thing in you that you can give her that you haven't
given me? You and I know each other very well; perhaps I know YOU too
well. Haven't you loved me as much as you can love anyone? Think of all
that there has been between us that you are ready now, eager now to set
aside and forget as though it had never been. For four days you have
kept me out of your mind in order to worship her. Yet you have known
I was there—for all you would not know. No one else will ever be so
intimate with you as I am. We have quarrelled together, wept together,
jested happily and jested bitterly. You have spared me not at all.
Pitiless and cruel you have been to me. You have reckoned up all my
faults against me as though they were sins. You have treated me at times
unlovingly—never was lover treated so unlovingly as you have sometimes
treated me. And yet I have your love—as no other woman can ever have
it. Even now when you are wildly in love with this girl's freshness and
boldness and cleverness I come into your mind by right and necessity."